Category: English

In the meantime, I can look back on several years of consulting for Product Life Cycle Management. A topic whose popularity has fluctuated considerably over the years and is currently on the rise again in the wake of digital transformation.

Despite the increasing attention for PLM again, I notice that the term continues to have a large, cumbersome, tedious, and uneconomical taste. Amazing, because the effort that many companies put into ERP projects, for example, was and is significantly higher in most cases. Nevertheless, the necessity and benefits of – expensive – ERP projects are discussed, but rarely questioned, see Haribo and Lidl.

How do these different perceptions come about? One explanation could be that the benefits of PLM for management and employees in companies have not been sufficiently exploited over the years. This was mainly due to the fact that the scope and visibility of PLM projects in companies was often very limited.

A closer look shows that many of the earlier PLM implementations were in fact PDM implementations. PDM, Product Data Management, focuses on product descriptive data, primarily CAD models and drawings. “PLM” was therefore limited to the core areas of product development, very often even to Mechanical Design. Although beeing avilable in some PLM solutions for years, Change Management, Document Management, Project Management, cross-departmental collaboration or communication with external parties have not been used. Instead, solutions based on Excel, Outlook, the file system or SharePoint were often created on their own. Tools that everyone in the company knows. And for those one can very easily find someone to “optimize” these tools by macro programming. In addition to that, the negative attitude towards PLM was certainly fuelled by the overloaded, highly compressed “engineering user interfaces” of the 1st and 2nd PLM product generations.

So it’s no surprise that PLM was seen in the company as an expensive, less useful and exotic application!

In the current PLM renaissance, companies now have every opportunity to learn from the deficits of the past and to take advantage of the impressive potential of Product Lifecycle Management. Many obsolete and discontinued PDM and PLM solutions are currently or soon to be replaced by modern 3rd generation PLM platforms, which also support the use cases around the Digital Twin and the Internet of Things. They breathe life into the PLM idea by effectively and efficiently supporting processes across phases, departments and company boundaries. New, web-based HTML-5 user interfaces significantly increase acceptance among all user groups in the company by making even complex relationships clearer and handling them more efficient.

Now there is a chance to realize “real” Product Lifecycle Management! Against the background of new, digital business models, which put the use phase of products much more in the foreground, this becomes all the more important. PLM solutions play a central role here, as they lay the foundation for data relating to the Digital Twin.

But in the end, hard facts also count when it comes to benefits and ROI: If PLM is actually used company-wide with all its possibilities, high economies of scale quickly result from the significant minimization of non-value-adding activities. This alone often enables a return on investment after just one year. Regardless of the additional revenue potential from new, data-driven business models that PLM will enable in the future.

New topics
must be sorted with suitable terms. They make communication efficient, because
in the best case the sender does not have to explain things from scratch.

The term
Product Lifecycle Management was a fairly good way of doing this. You remember:
“From the cradle to the grave” and so on. But as the Germans are,
they go to the bottom of everything and even deeper. Over the years, there have
been plenty of challenging definitions, many of them, which have not helped
much.

Here we go again, I thought while reading a recent article The Digital Twin Theory. The authors on the beginnings of their work: “On the other hand, the idea of ‘Digital Twin Theory’ matured during a random contact with quantum physics…: From the point of view of quantum physics, electrons are located in several places simultaneously… It seemed exciting to examine whether these properties could also be assumed for digital twins”.

OK, the
freedom of science is a great asset, and original thinkers are in demand. But
please don’t be too original. That something is not wrong is not enough, right?
It should also be somewhat helpful.

Why the fuss?
The Digital Twin is a beautiful, simple picture to understand the potential
behind the Internet of Things. It would be a pity if this were lost according
to the motto “Why just when you can make it complicated?”

And by the way, the English Wikipedia says: “A digital twin is a digital replica of a … physical entity…”

Let’s get digital – The Internet of Things (IoT) has an outstanding influence on the relationship between companies and their customers. Companies now face the challenge of placing attractive digital offerings so as not to fall behind. The white paper identifies the central mechanisms of digital offerings and identifies the 14 most important patterns and blueprints for IoT-driven business models.

Market pressure and a new terrain. The markets are becoming digital and smart. Hardly any industry or offer that is not networked and/or in the cloud – at least that’s how it seems. This is undoubtedly a trend that is massively promoted by market-determining players, especially from Silicon Valley. Today, we are all influenced by the use of smartphones and home automation solutions, and we transfer corresponding expectations to other areas as well. The question of “whether” no longer arises, but rather of “how”. According to McKinsey the sales potential for digitized products in the B2B environment is even twice as high as in the B2C sector! Certainly, some phenomena on the market can be accepted as hypes. However, it is also certain that concrete developments and sometimes existential challenges also arise in supposedly firmly established markets:

Innovative and established competitors place an offer as “first mover”, attracting attention to themselves from customers for whom digitisation is not yet an issue.

New players are breaking into existing markets and placing previously unknown offers on the basis of digitized services.

Previously specialized providers (non-providers or providers of secondary services) are expanding their offerings digitally and thus attacking providers in the core market.

The Internet of Things (“IoT”) as a vehicle for digitized product offerings is virtually universal and knows no industry or process boundaries. According to Gartner, this is reflected in “ambitious IoT plans” in a wide variety of industries. Many companies are therefore being forced to confront the potential erosion of their markets by new suppliers.

The challenge lies not only in the high market dynamics, but also in the technical and sales challenges in a partly unknown territory. Many, especially medium-sized companies, lack software know-how, especially if it goes beyond the embedded area. In particular, this includes networked and distributed product architectures or analytics.

Another complicating factor is the fact that suitable personnel is not actually available on the market today. In addition, it is not only about recruiting new employees, but also about building up new business areas. In order to be able to act, companies must invest in completely new alliances and partner models.

The following white paper focuses on the second area of customer service improvement and uses the term “IoT”. The analysis of IoT projects shows that the majority of projects are based on the expansion of a market position in existing markets, i. e. the expansion of the existing product range. Only a few companies approach new markets. In other words, companies generally take a very cautious approach to new business options and try to avoid risks.